Parasite rides new streaming wave to glory
Apioneering director. A deserved best-picture award at an Oscars night. Sublime storytelling via subtitles. This has happened only twice.
This week, Bong Joon-ho’s
Parasite, a South Korean masterpiece, became the first foreign-language film to earn the industry’s top prize. William Wellman’s 1927 aviation epic
Wings, the last of the great silent movies, won the first Oscar.
These two films, separated by more than 90 years, both emerged at a time of convulsive change brought on by disruptive technology, shifts in consumer behaviour and a reassessment of how to value creative intellectual property.
The year Wings was released, new recording technology ushered in the talkies, transforming Hollywood. Parasite is a bellwether of an arguably greater change, propelled by translation algorithms and an unsustainable war among rival TV streaming services.
Each media earnings announcement from Hollywood and Silicon Valley highlights the ferocious competition among Disney+, Hulu, Alphabet’s YouTube TV and AT&T’s WarnerMedia; the investment needed to compete with Netflix (167-million global subscribers) and Amazon Prime (150-million subscribers) also becomes evident.
For content producers worldwide, it has become at once more difficult to bet on a winning production and, theoretically, easier to put content in front of new audiences. Parasite’s triumph belongs indisputably to Bong, but he shares some credit with the power of the globalised sofa.
In the analysis of Parasite’s success, much will be made of the forces harnessed under the Netflix umbrella. Justifiably so.
The Californian media company, its role as a studio, its new habit of exposing people to unfamiliar television and the way it has normalised the “pull” model of content delivery are all critical.
US and worldwide audiences can consume Belgian detective drama, Spanish biopics, Chinese reality shows and German cyber-thrillers with increasing indifference to origin. Language has become a surmountable barrier; subtitles are irrelevant. This audience consumes everything — from commentary on Instagram food pictures to WeChat updates on the Oscar ceremony — as a jostling assault of images and words. Script along the bottom of a screen is nothing.
Bong — and South Korean films more broadly — understood this and directly benefited from Netflix’s expanding ambitions. In 2017, his Netflix-backed adventure
Okja competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Parasite is also part of a successful “Korean wave” of exports centred on music and drama and on the success of media giants CJ E&M and SM Entertainment. Underlying this has been a double recognition by South Korean producers: their entertainment IP can be tweaked to have a distinct, rising value overseas and technology now allows them to pump it cheaply and accessibly to couch potatoes worldwide.